Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to telematics and intelligent vehicle technologies and more particularly to intelligent parking management for motor vehicles.
Description of the Related Art
Telematics is an interdisciplinary field of study that encompasses telecommunications, vehicular technologies, road transportation, road safety, electrical engineering inclusive of sensors, instrumentation, and wireless communications, and computer science. An intelligent vehicle technology refers to a telematic arrangement of one or more electronic, electro-mechanical and electromagnetic devices, including different sensors disposed externally from and internally to a vehicle, operating in concert along with a radio transceiver to provide vehicle command and control and information services. Modern intelligent vehicle technology products primarily focus upon vehicular safety and hazard warning as well as traffic and navigation.
Parking assistance systems relate to intelligent vehicle technologies in so far as parking assistance systems facilitate the location of an available parking space and, through the use of telematics, facilitate the placement of a vehicle into a parking space. Indeed, for several years, advanced parking assistance systems have been able to provide for the automated parking of a vehicle without human intervention. Yet, most commercially successful parking assistance systems address the need to manage a parking lot or parking garage by locating available parking spaces and publishing a count of available spaces for viewing by a motorist.
In this regard, a general implementation of a parking assistance system utilizes digital camera technology and content based image retrieval technologies so as to identify one or more different available parking spaces in a parking lot. Different light emitting diode (LED) lighting systems are coupled to a controller receiving and reducing acquired imagery so as to guide a motorist to an available parking space. However, as it will be understood, conventional parking assistance systems are vehicle agnostic and driver agnostic. Instead, conventional parking assistance systems are simply one-dimensional in respect to the binary determination of whether or not a parking space is occupied.
But, not all parking spaces are suitable for all vehicles. Further, not all parking spaces are suitable for all motorists. Different parking spaces are best occupied by vehicles of a particular size or weight. Likewise, different motorists have different capabilities in parking a vehicle in a particular parking space. Most importantly, different motorists have different needs in respect to a location of a parking space relative to one or more different, extrinsic criteria such as the weather and the location of one or more waypoints of travel of each motorist. Yet, modern parking assistance systems do not provide a way to account for such needs of the individual motorist and the individual vehicle.